Editor’s Note: This post is from Search Engine Journal’s new ebook How Search Engines Work. This guide will teach you how search engines function and the key factors that influence search engine results pages. Want your copy now? Download it here or scroll to the bottom of this post for more details.

Optimizing websites without first understanding how search engines function is akin to publishing your great novel without first learning how to write.

Certainly, a thousand monkeys at typewriters will eventually create something useful (at least this monkey likes to think he does from time to time), but it’s a lot easier if you know the core elements of a task beforehand.

So we must understand how search engines work to fully understand how to optimize for them.

While we will be focusing on organic search, we must first briefly talk about one critical truth about search engines.

Paid Search Results

Not Google, not Bing, nor any other major search engine is in the business of providing organic listings.

That is to say, organic results are the means to an end, but do not directly generate revenue for them.

Basically, Google and Bing (and the others) are advertising engines that happen to draw users to their properties with organic listings. Organic, then, is the means to the end.

Why does this matter?

It’s the key point driving in:

Their layout changes.

The existence of search features like knowledge panels and featured snippets.

The click-through rates (CTR) of organic results.

When Google adds a fourth paid search result to commercial-intent queries it’s because of this.

When Google displays a featured snippet so you don’t have to leave Google.com to get an answer to your query… it is because of this.

Regardless of what change you may see taking place it’s important to keep this in mind and always question not just what it will impact today but what further changes do they imply may be on the horizon.

How Search Engines Work Today: The Series

Alright, now that we have that baseline understanding of why Google even provides organic results let’s look at the nuts-and-bolts of how they operate.

Indexing

For the uninitiated, indexing essentially refers to the adding of a webpage’s content into Google.

When you create a new page on your site there are a number of ways it can be indexed.

The simplest method of getting a page indexed is to do absolutely nothing.

Google has crawlers following links and thus, provided your site is in the index already and that the new content is linked to from within your site, Google will eventually discover it and add it to its index. More on this later.

But what if you want Googlebot to get to your page faster?

This can be important if you have timely content or if you’ve made an important change to a page you need Google to know about.

One of the top reasons I use faster methods is when I’ve either optimized a critical page or I’ve adjusted the title and/or description to improve click-throughs and want to know specifically when they were picked up and displayed in the SERPs to know where the measurement of improvement starts.

Firebase, Google’s mobile app platform, gives Google direct access to the app content, bypassing any need to figure out how to crawl it.

This is the future – enabling Google to index content immediately, without effort, so it can then serve it in the format most usable based on the accessing technology.

While we aren’t quite where we need to be in our technologies to stress too much about this side of things, just know it is coming.

I cannot recommend enough following Cindy Krum’s MobileMoxie blog, where she discusses these and mobile-related subjects in great detail and with great insight.

4. And Bing, Too!

To get your content indexed and/or updates quickly by Bing, you will need a Bing Webmaster Tools account.

If you don’t have one, I can’t recommend it enough. The info provided within is substantial and will help you better assess problem areas and improve your rankings on Bing, Google and anywhere else – and probably provide a better user experience as well.

Crawl Budget

Basically, crawl budget is a term used to describe the amount of resources that Google will expend crawling a website.

The budget assigned is based on a combination of factors, the two central ones being:

How fast your server is (i.e., how much can Google crawl without degrading your user experience).

How important your site is.

If you run a major news site with constantly updating content that search engine users will want to be aware of your site will get crawled frequently (dare I say … constantly).

If you run a small barbershop, have a couple of dozen links, and rightfully are not deemed important in this context (you may be an important barber in the area but you’re not important when it comes to crawl budget) then the budget will be low.

You can read more about crawl budgets and how they’re determined in Google’s explanation here.

Discover How Search Engines Work

Want to optimize your site the right way and set yourself up for success? Then it’s critical to know how search engines operate today.

Written by this author, How Search Engines Work, tackles how search engines function and the key factors that influence search engine results pages.